My Pet Chicken Blog

In my neighborhood, olive trees are a pretty common landscaping tree. They’re in many parks and backyards, dropping olives, staining sidewalks and shoes, and making a general mess.  Olive picking sounds like fun, but you don’t know pain until you’ve sprained an ankle on a slimy olive pit, slid down the sidewalk, and been dumped unceremoniously […]

I have an embarrassingly large number of chickens who eat quite a bit of food. (Let’s not get into actual numbers of birds I may or may not have, because then the chicken math I keep in my head starts to break down.) So when my friend Judi showed me her DIY No-Waste feeder, I had to make a waste […]

It’s that time of year when your luscious green grass starts to dry up and become crunchy and brown.  It doesn’t look very appetizing, so why would your chickens want that? Wouldn’t you want a fresh green salad all year round? Well, HELLO FODDER!!! Sprouting fodder for your chickens is similar to growing sprouts for human consumption. […]

One of the weirdest things I see on the cartons  of commercial eggs in stores is this: “Vegetarian-fed.” Vegetarian chickens? Ha! What are they thinking? Chickens are omnivores, so even setting aside the conditions most commercial hens endure, it seems strange that any company would purposefully claim their hens are vegetarian chickens. You don’t have to be an […]

It’s just about time for wild blackberries to ripen in my area; I can hardly wait!  The chickens and I like eating seasonally, and the girls enjoy the blackberries just as much as I do. We have all sorts of fruits at our farm–blackberries, black raspberries, peaches, apples, plums, persimmons, cherries and pears, just to […]

Some of my most cherished memories from childhood are from the years I lived on my grandparent’s 160 acre farm in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. My grandfather would plow his fields with a team of mules and I would plod along behind busting up dirt clods with my bare feet. We had chickens that […]